Investigate: Support publishing Composer package to one central GitLab project
Context
When comparing GitLab's Package offering to solutions like Artifactory or Nexus, a key missing feature is virtual registries. A virtual registry allows you to group many other repositories behind a single URL, to make distributing packages easier at large organizations.
GitLab does not yet support this feature. But, as a workaround, we suggest to customers that they use a single project to store all of their packages. This allows the customer to simplify their workflows and still use a single URL.
Problem to solve
The problem is that you cannot publish your Composer dependencies to one central project as suggested in the documentation. This means that you may have many different URLs needed to download your packages. That's inconvenient for small teams and untenable for larger teams.
Customer quote:
When a company like ours has a big collection of packages, it is desirable to have all those package together in one project.
Proposal
Change the current implementation of Composer package to support pushing the package to a project that does not contain the source code.